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Pictured is Hanna Boos’s sculpture, a cement cast mounted on an oak base, of the distinguished Canadian literary critic and professor Northrop Frye. Some readers may have seen the bronze cast of this same sculpture, one and one-half life size, in the E J Pratt Library of Victoria University, University of Toronto.

Hanna Boos studied under the sculptor Ingeborg von Rath in Dusseldorf, Germany, and later joined the workshop of the sculptor Frances Gage in Toronto. A friend of the notable Canadian sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle, Gage was connected to the Group of Seven: she produced reliefs of Frederick Varley and A.Y. Jackson in Tom Thomson’s shack. For examples of Hanna Boos’s work, see https://www.art-in-guelph.com/Pages/HBoos.html

This spring, Hanna’s sculpture of Northrop Frye will be travelling to Beaver House, where it will be on display until a later time at which it will permanently reside in the Lusi Wong Library of Renison University College, University of Waterloo.

A reception was held on the afternoon of May 11 to celebrate the arrival of this magnificent sculpture at Beaver House. This event included talks by Beverley Cairns (on Hanna Boos’s sculptural influences), Prof. Jonathan Schmidt (on Northrop Frye), and Hanna Boos herself (on how she came to sculpt Northrop Frye), as well as a performance of several of Peter Skoggard’s musical settings of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, sung by tenor Robert Missen.